Show HN: Opensidian
opensidian.org
opensidian.org
Not true. The lock-in risk is the flow you get used to with Obsidian. If Obsidian disappears, I'm left with a bunch of MD files... so that's just like my file system, and if I needed just a file system to begin with, I wouldn't use Obsidian
This is an example of why I don't think we're getting anywhere near an age of abundance with AI: we're using the power we've gained in a reductive way.
Assuming this, I see even LESS of a reason NOT to have a wide array of open versions we can all hack our way from. We'll collectively have to invest less if we have an open base to work from. Reinventing the wheel doesn't stop being reinventing the wheel because an LLM did it.
In case anyone has a fuzzy memory, back during peak NFT hype grifters would take art made by other artists and attempt to tokenize it as NFTs without the consent of the original artist, or otherwise possibly copy said artist's work and make a collection of it.
It was disgusting and parasitic then and it's disgusting and parasitic now.
Edit: I stand corrected. It does appear that this is a serious issue.
Given that photographs are copyrightable, I wouldn't hold my breath on projects like this being deemed ineligible for copyright.
> Nearly all of the code, the design docs, and this README were written by Claude
The only way courts will deem LLM output to be copyrightable is if there is substantial human input. Just orchestrating agents won't be enough.
Copyright in compilation would be sufficient alone, requiring no new laws, to my reading. In particular:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation
> In the copyright law in the United States, such copyright may exist when the materials in the compilation (or "collective work") are selected, coordinated, or arranged creatively such that a new work is produced. Copyright does not exist when content is compiled without creativity, such as in the production of a telephone directory. In the case of compilation copyright, the compiler does not receive copyright in the underlying material, but only in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of that material.
All my experience seeing orgs ship real production code with the assistance of AI over months/many-thousands-of-commits shows that the skill not only lies in what context you choose to provide in the first place (product and technical specifications, design guidelines, prompting process with the model(s)), but also in how to effectively review and test all of it, which is still done with human direction throughout. This is why people with no experience in coding can't do with AI what an industry veteran with 20 years shipping to production can.
In any case, I think existing reading of copyright law will be sufficient to say that large AI-driven software projects are a process of orchestration and also of curation in selecting what actually gets committed (or, if commit-by-default is enabled, then what to revert). This may not always be true in the future, though, as capabilities increase...one part of me thinks you could just do random stuff like "Make me an excel except every cell is a powerpoint presentation" and a good enough AI would reason through and produce something without further input. But I think in most cases, folks have a real set of requirements in mind, and get all of them into the AI through a process of iteration in various ways. I think that's real work that requires skill and, in many cases, creativity, at least in the sense that someone else walking up to the same tool and prompting on their own would produce a very different output than you'd see if you asked the same person to retry the same project.
Time will tell.
1. Multimedia. I have a cookbook with photos and videos in my Obsidian, as well as songbooks with musical notation that renders properly.
2. Databases. e.g. for an international vacation I created the itinerary as a "Base" (structured database) that rendered out to a calendar and day-by-day pages. This even included floating itinerary items like "eat X kind of cuisine" to squeeze in on any day, shopping lists for gifts to bring back, as well as all train routes, flight numbers, hotel/ticket confirmation numbers and the like. Then on each day I could journal what we did and see what we still had to do. I was able to share these with everyone on the trip and make sure everyone got to experience their must-see items.
3. You can argue all of the above would also work as a website. But Obsidian makes this work across my phones and tablets too, in a way that I can edit from mobile whenever I need to jot down a quick edit. That's the killer feature.
That one simple trick makes it incredibly useful for its intended purpose.
Plus the hotbar on mobile makes it easy to do bullets/checkboxes, as easy as typing on my computer keyboard.
However, enough people find those things valuable enough that Obsidian has millions of paying users.
I don't think software really need to penetrate more than 1% of the market to be profitable. If Obsidian penetrated even 10% of the market, they would have been worth >$30B lol.
ethics aside, where is the profit? rust/tauri is same electron except with rust. legally questionable "open-source" label?
Has it become a trend to pick up some proprietary software and vibecode a replacement for it and then slap a FOSS license on it?
Very much, yes. It started niche, and then notable sloppified projects made the normie news (Artcraft, sloppified Adobe software stack) and Sony's "you will own nothing" stance made people target the PS5 and popular titles that are now popular decompilation and emulation projects.
After that made the rounds, it seems everyone has gone full tilt on remaking existing products, but worse (there are some that are decent, but this does not look like one of them)
It's cool and interesting, but I can't help but feel we're about the enter an entirely new era of anti-consumer lobbying leading to new legislation that will be an absolute bloodbath for these projects, all while making individual consumer rights even worse.